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Battleship Potemkin with live music
January 27th, 2008
A group of fifteen Russian students joined students studying "Politics in Film" for a special screening of Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin. The screening featured live accompaniment by the Minnesota Orchestra, using a score by Shostakovich. Although the music was not written for the film, the score was painstakingly constructed using excerpts from Shostakovich's symphonies when a restored version of the film was released in the Soviet Union in 1976. Finnish conductor Esa Heikkilä used a TV monitor to keep the orchestra synchronized with the film. In the Q & A after the show, he compared his task to "conducting a singer who is deaf and always right."